Well, it used to be called global warming, and now it´s called climate change - did you ever wonder why? The truly catastrophic climate change - human extincti

Well, it used to be called global warming, and now it´s called climate change - did you ever wonder why? The truly catastrophic climate change - human extinction - outcome is the runaway greenhouse scenario. That´s been floated, but it runs into the evidence that the earth has been considerably warmer before (both poles melted) without that happening. But I suspect it will get another look after this year. The slightly less catastrophic climate change outcome is the next ice age being triggered. We know what causes them, but there´s a fair amount of variance as to when, and we don´t know what the exact trigger is. The next ice age though, isn´t a catastrophe everywhere, in particular there´s a lot of reasons to believe India benefits for example. A general warming accompanied by a significant sea level rise is a catastrophe for Bangladesh (most of which is below 10metres above sea level), the Pacific Atolls, India, South America and Africa (heat extremes) extremely expensive for the USA, and Europe, and good news for Scandinavia, Canada and Russia. However, the general tone of the climate change debate for the last couple of decades, is not such that it would encourage a nuanced debate about the possibility that it could go either way. Nor is the planet really ready for a reasoned debate between its two hemispheres as to which outcome would be preferable, and for whom. However, the rise this year though has even the alarmists scared - especially with the suspicion that it´s entirely probable that there´s been a tendency for scientists to favour the less extreme predictions when modelling the problem, and even those have been bad enough. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/07/climate_scientists_despair_most_devastating_parts_of_esquire_s_jason_box.html?wpisrc=obinsite http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201... http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/IceAgeBook/history_of_climate.html http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/IceAgeBook/history_of_climate.ht...